


I Never Wanted Power So Much

by Jude



Category: Death Note, The X-Files, Warehouse 13
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 22:29:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3706327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jude/pseuds/Jude
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully and Mulder encounter a Death Note in the course of their work on the X-Files.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Never Wanted Power So Much

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Akycha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akycha/gifts).



**3:35 pm, March 7, Columbia, Maryland**

"I'm Agent Mulder," he said, flashing his badge to the sullen brown-haired white teenage boy at the door, "and this is Agent Scully. We'd like to talk to Jason Nightingale."

"Are you with the FBI?" the teenager asked with marginally more interest than Scully thought he was capable of.

"Yes," Mulder said, without adding any smart remarks, for which Scully gave him points.

"I'm Jason," the teenager, predictably enough, said.

"You called the FBI to say you had some information about the death of Senator W——?" Scully said, suspecting that the teenager might react better to a woman asking him questions.

She was, alas, correct. Jason Nightingale stood up straighter and made an attempt to at least put a blank expression on his face, as opposed to the sullen one. "Yes, ma'am. Um, my parents are home. Could we go somewhere else to talk?"

"Sure," Scully said, knowing she was going to get tired of this soon.

Jason yelled over his shoulder, "Moooom, I'm going out with some friends!" He waited briefly for an acknowledging noise from the depths of the suburban house before emerging onto the front steps and shutting the door behind him.

"Come on, let's, uh, you have a car, right? Let's go for a drive," he said, glancing around in a decidedly shifty way.

"Right," Scully said, and reluctantly handed the keys to Mulder. She guessed she'd be doing most of the information-gathering, and it was hard to look interested when you're watching the road. But, dammit, it had taken a lot of hardassery to get to drive this time.

In the car, Mulder said, "Any particular place you want to go?"

Jason shook his head, then added, "No, just drive." There was that shifty look again.

"So, Jason, you realize that Senator W—— was struck by lightning," Mulder said.

"Yeah, and you don't think that's suspicious?" Jason snarled. "I mean, he was talking about his voting record, and he _lied_ right before he was struck. I _checked_."

Scully glanced aside at Mulder. It seemed such a shame that a kid who was clearly Mulder's favorite kind of conspiracy theory loonytune was so aggressively anti-Mulder. She said, "As we all know, politicians lie pretty frequently. A lightning bolt isn't something someone can arrange."

"Well, okay, what about Representative B—— last week?" Jason said.

Mulder had one of his tight little smiles. "Wood chipper accidents _do_ happen sometimes."

"I was wondering why there was a wood chipper operating next to the speaking platform, myself," Scully said conversationally, while thinking, Doooooom.

"And that guy running for President the week before?" Jason said.

"But it's not really tornado season," Mulder said.

"Are you saying that all these aren't just tragic coincidences?" Scully said, trying to keep her tone even.

"Look, they're all really similar politically," Jason said evasively.

"And…?" Scully said, arching an eyebrow.

"And I know how she's doing it," Jason said, wilting under something that wasn't even her _best_ glare.

"She?" Scully prompted.

"My sister," Jason said in a tone that suggested he'd like to kick her. "Lucy."

"You think your sister Lucy is killing politicians with natural disasters and bizarre accidents?" Scully said. She tried hard to keep the disbelief out of her voice, but failed, as usual.

"I know it sounds crazy!" Jason said, bouncing forward on the seat earnestly. "But you wouldn't have come if you didn't think something was weird, right?"

Oh, something was weird all right, Scully thought. Mulder, damn him, was _grinning_. She wondered how a crank phone call like this one had filtered down to the X-Files. It had to have been taken by one of the people who had it in for Mulder.

"Is Lucy your older or younger sister?" Scully asked.

"Older," he said. "She's in college at Berkeley. A senior."

"So how do you think she has something to do with these deaths?" Scully said in her most reasonable tone.

"I…" Jason paused, looking at her appeallingly. "If I tell you, I'm… I'm guilty of a crime too, do I get clemency because I'm giving you information?"

Scully had fortunately had years and years of being an FBI agent _and_ working with Mulder to school her face into immobility despite being at the end of her patience. "It will depend on the crime, Jason."

He looked down at his hands, or his knees, or the floorboard, or something, and mumbled to himself. She thought she caught, "… going to die if I don't tell… she'll kill me too…" 

Scully let him stew for a moment then, after exchanging another glance with Mulder, she said, "We'd like to help you if we can. But we need more information."

"Ooookay," Jason said. "You're gonna think I'm crazy."

Yes, yes, I will, thought Scully, but aloud, she said, "Believe me, we've heard a lot of things."

"So, like, I found this… notebook," Jason said, fidgeting with his fingers.

Scully composed her expression into receptive interest. Out of the corner of her eye, Mulder was grinning like a maniac.

"It had instructions on the inside of the front cover," Jason continued. "It said that I could end someone's life by writing their name in the book while picturing their face. I had to know the name, though."

"And you tried it," Scully guessed.

"Yeah," Jason said, looking anywhere but at her. "I… it was a guy who'd been bullying me since I was in second grade. No one ever did anything about him. He broke my arm once." 

Mulder's grin had faded and he was clearly listening intently.

"What happened?" Scully said.

"I wrote… the instructions said that if you wrote a time and a way for them to die within… I don't know, like 40 seconds or something… they'd die that way," Jason said. "So I wrote that he would kill himself."

"And?" Scully said.

"He did," Jason said in a tone Scully couldn't really interpret. "I didn't write a time, so he… just… turned and jumped headfirst out his bedroom window. In front of his mother and little sister. It was two stories. He broke his neck."

"when did this happen?" Scully asked. "And what was his name?"

"Just before Thanksgiving," he said. "Like two weeks before. Um. David Stipes."

"All right," Scully said. "What happened then?"

"There was a lot of… mess," Jason said reluctantly. "I decided that I should only use it on people I don't know. So, like, there was a guy who was molesting kids who got off with like three months in jail. So I did him. He just died of a heart attack. I figured letting the default happen was okay, cause he was old."

Scully, of course, asked the man's name and date of death, and Jason provided them. She produced her own notebook and started writing things down. "And then what happened?"

"And thennnn… okay, this is where it gets kind of crazy," Jason said.

"Go on," Scully encouraged.

"And then this… guy appeared in my room. Really, kind of a monster, really ugly and grey with huge staring eyes."

"Grey, you said?" Mulder asked. Scully barely kept from rolling her eyes.

"Yeah," Jason said, not paying much attention to Mulder. "And he ate apples all the time. His name was Ryuk, and he said he was a Death Agent, and what I had was a Death Note, like he had. And he'd let me find the Death Note because he was bored."

Mulder opened his mouth to say something, but he caught Scully's forbidding expression and shut his mouth again.

Jason gave Scully a pleading look. "I'm telling the truth," he said.

"I believe you," she said, and she'd said it so often to so many crackpots that it came out sincere.

"He… offered to give me Death Agent Eyesight," Jason said. "It… lets you see someone's real name and how much life they have left."

"What did he want in trade?" Mulder said. He looked at Scully. "These things always come as a trade."

"Half my life," Jason said. "I… well, I said sure."

Kids, Scully thought. Always think they're immortal.

"It was pretty cool, walking around being able to see everyone's real name and how much life they had left," Jason said. "Except when I saw my grandma at Thanksgiving. I… I made sure to hug her. A lot." He looked away from Scully and scrubbed at his face.

"When did she die?" Scully said gently.

"New Year's Eve," he said, his voice breaking a little.

"How old are you, Jason?" she asked.

"Fourteen," he said. "I turn fifteen in June."

"So what else happened?" Scully said, trying to pull him back to his narrative.

It worked. He took a deep breath. "Well, I wrote a couple of murderers down in the Death Note because… well, my dad said they were just a drain on taxpayer money, being in jail. And another child porn guy. But then at Christmas, my sister found my Death Note while I was out."

"Does she usually go through your room?" Mulder said.

"No," Jason said sourly. "She'd walked in on me looking at it once, and I guess I didn't hide it well enough after that. And she… found the scrapbook I was keeping, I guess."

Mulder would have something to say about that part later, Scully guessed, given his career of profiling serial killers.

"What did Lucy do?" Scully said.

"Well, at first, I didn't know what had happened to the Death Note," Jason said. "I couldn't find it anywhere. Ryuk didn't come talk to me any more. I thought maybe he'd taken it back. Then I was afraid my mom had found it and was freaking out somewhere. It wasn't until Lucy was leaving for California that she told me she had it." His face screwed up in fury. "She said I'd been using it stupidly, and she'd put it to much smarter use. Plus, she said, she'd be more interesting for Ryuk to watch." He nearly spat out the last sentence.

"And that's why you think Lucy is behind these deaths?" Scully said.

"They're all politicians she hates," Jason said. "She couldn't stop bitching about them at Christmas. I guess she's really _happy_ right now."

"Do you know Lucy's address at Berkeley?" Scully said, notebook ready.

He provided it like he'd memorized it for just that moment. Scully duly wrote it down.

"Where do you want us to drop you off?" Mulder said.

"I have a friend who lives right around the corner here," Jason said after looking around.

"We may have more questions for you after we've discussed what you've told us," Scully said.

"Well, come back and drive me around again, and I'll answer them," Jason said. "I won't talk about this on the phone."

"Right," said Mulder. He pulled up to the curb.

Jason started to get out and paused. "What did you say your names were again, Agents?"

Scully started to say something, but Mulder cut in with, "She's Agent Scullen and I'm Agent Muldoon."

Jason nodded and said, "Okay," before hopping out.

 

Mulder drove them back to a burger joint they'd passed, since both of them had missed lunch. In the car, burger in hand, Scully said, "So you believe him." 

Mulder chewed thoughtfully, then said, "Better safe than sorry, don't you think?" Then he added, "I think we need to book a flight."

Scully eyed him. "You believe that someone can kill people by writing their name in a notebook."

Mulder watched her around his French fries. "I believe in aliens and vampires, and you're _surprised_ , Scully?"

Scully rolled her eyes. "I never cease to be surprised by the depths of your rich inner life, Mulder."

"I'm usually right, though, aren't I?" he said.

"You usually _think_ you're right," Scully said, and, having lost her appetite, put her burger back in the bag and drove them to the airport.

 

**March 8, 9:10 am, Berkeley, California**

"Sleep well, Scully?" Mulder said, handing her a paper cup of coffee from the hotel's "continental breakfast."

She stared into the brown depths, and reached for a single half-and-half. "I suppose. How about you?"

"Nothing good on TV," Mulder said with a shrug.

"Do you have ideas for how to approach her?" Scully said as they sat in the far corner of the lounge. "If you believe her brother, she may be able to see our names when she meets us." She thought about that for a moment. "Speaking of that, if he could see our names, why did he ask us for them at the end?"

"He used the past tense when he was talking about that ability," Mulder said. "'It was pretty cool.' I think he lost the ability with the notebook."

"Does he think he'll get it back if we get it from her?" Scully said. "Otherwise, why would he ask our names?"

"He may have some kind of backup plan," Mulder said. "He might think that Lucy will run home if we show up."

"It's interesting that she only started using it in the last few weeks, if she took it at Christmas," Scully said.

"She may have been using it locally," Mulder said.

"We should look into that," Scully said, knowing as she said it that _she_ would end up doing that. It's not like Mulder ever did any of the background research.

"Yep. Well, let's just start by finding her apartment and talking to her," Mulder said, standing up.

Scully finished her terrible coffee and went with him to find their rental car.

 

It was a house, actually, not an apartment, and while the rest of it was dingy and run-down, the front door had been painted bright yellow in recent memory. Scully let Mulder handle the door introductions. He used Scullen and Muldoon again, and asked for Lucy Nightingale.

The young woman who answered the door maintained an expression that was somewhere between boredom and hostility as they flashed their IDs as fast as they dared. After a moment's consideration, she said, "Lucy's not here."

"Do you know when she might be back?" Scully said.

"We don't monitor each other in this house the way the government might want us to," the woman said. Scully noticed she was wearing baggy jeans and a Berkeley sweatshirt.

"Do you know if she's been here recently?" Mulder asked.

The woman shrugged with one shoulder, as if they weren't worth both shoulders. "Sorry," she said, and shut the door in their faces.

They turned and walked back down the steps to the sidewalk, then looked back at the house over their shoulders. 

"Think she's there?" Mulder said.

Scully thought about the young woman at the door, mentally overlaying Jason's sullen face on hers, and considered the brown, slightly curly hair on both: probably Lucy, as she'd thought at the door. "Yup."

Mulder glanced at her. "You think that was her."

"Yup," Scully said again.

"Why didn't you say anything?" he said, a little perturbed.

"I wanted to see how she reacted," Scully said. And whether you noticed the resemblance too.

They got into the car. "We're doing a stakeout, aren't we?" Mulder said.

"You are," Scully said. "I'm going to the library to check the newspapers. I saw one a few blocks away. Drop me around the corner and I'll walk."

 

There were a couple of local deaths that might have been part of the whole thing if one were to accept Jason Nightingale's story, Scully thought as she scrubbed the newspaper ink off her fingers in the rest room. Only one that really looked fishy: a thirty-one-year-old man convicted of multiple counts of child molestation suddenly dying of a heart attack after receiving a three year suspended sentence.

She gave herself a dubious look in the mirror. _If_ one were to accept Jason's story. Mulder had already accepted it.

The sudden scent of apples distracted her, as if someone had just bitten into an apple and breathed over her shoulder. She spun around, but no one was there. When she looked in the mirror again, she thought she caught a glimpse of eyes staring at her. Despite the sudden jump in her heart rate, she forced herself to dry her hands and walk, not run, out of the ladies' room.

She began to wonder about her current stress levels and overactive imagination as she met Mulder out in the parking lot.

"Anything?" he said, pulling his iced tea straw out of his mouth.

"Maybe," Scully said. "You?"

"She headed out about fifteen minutes after I settled in," he said. "Walking. Got on a bus at the corner and took it to campus. By the time I found parking, she was gone."

"Great," Scully said, covering her eyes. "Mulder, are we wasting our time?"

"Depends on your point of view," Mulder said. "Beings like this Death Agent Jason referred to are common in many mythologies around the world. They're generally psychopomps of some variety, beings that conduct the dead to the next world, whatever that may be."

"Angels?" Scully said.

"Angels are almost never considered true psychopomps," Mulder said, falling into his "let me explain this" mode. "They're more often messengers. I'm talking about beings like the Japanese shinigami, whose name translates literally to 'death god', but who are part of a greater bureaucracy of the afterlife, working under the supervision of the actual god of death."

"Do any of these psychopomps carry notebooks?" Scully inquired a little archly. She hated Mulder's lectures.

"There are mythologies in which they write down the names of the dead," Mulder replied. "Or where they get the names of the dead from books or scrolls in which the names appear as people die. I wouldn't be surprised to find some using notebooks, especially in extensive bureaucracies where they would, presumably, move with the times."

Scully took a long, slow breath. "So now what? Assuming Jason was telling us the truth and his sister now has a notebook with which she can kill at a distance, in ways that look totally natural—"

"Or unnatural," Mulder inserted.

"Or unnatural," Scully said, "we have a serial killer running loose with her weapon, possibly a supernatural ally…" Scully paused, remembering those eyes in the mirror, then shook her head. "I don't see that we can accomplish much of anything here."

"I say we find her and get the notebook from her," Mulder said, putting the car in gear and pulling out of the parking lot.

"You think she's going to come home?" Scully said. "After losing you on campus?"

"Well, let's see what one of her roommates has to say," Mulder said.

So they returned to the house with the yellow front door and rang the bell.

A different young woman answered the door, wearing a flannel shirt and ripped jeans, her dirty blonde hair in stylish disarray. She glanced at Scully and smiled at Mulder. "Hi there," she said.

He smiled his vague, tired smile and introduced them. "We'd like to talk to Lucy Nightingale."

"Oh my god," she said, eyes going wide. She leaned closer to Mulder. "Is Lucy in trouble?"

"We just want to talk to her about some things," Mulder said vaguely.

"She's a total weirdo, you know, this doesn't surprise me at _all_ ," Lucy's roommate said, cheerfully throwing her under the Mulder Bus. "I don't think she's here right now, though," she added hesitantly, eyes locked on Mulder.

Mulder kept smiling. Scully did. not. understand this girl. Mulder said, "Do you know where we might find her?"

"She's a computer science major," the woman volunteered. "I think she works at the computer center. I see her there a lot," she added, as if to assure Mulder that she was a hard-working student.

"Great, thank you," Mulder said.

Back in the car, Mulder unfolded a map of the campus he'd found somewhere. "It's a start," he said, in response to the weight of her doubtful gaze on him.

 

They found her in the third, or perhaps fourth, computer center on the campus that they checked. She was sitting, typing with great concentration, at one of the PCs on one of the many long white tables in the off-white-walled room.

Scully stood by the door, with a straight run to the door on the opposite side of the room. Mulder stood where Lucy could see him and said, "Lucy Nightingale?"

She looked up and paled very slightly. Several other students glanced up, and then looked back at their work.

Mulder strolled a few steps closer. "Do you want to talk here, or can we go somewhere else?"

Lucy stood up, taking hold of her somewhat battered dark-red backpack, and tapped something on the keyboard. "Let's talk in the department lounge," she said.

The department lounge was a room stacked ceiling-high with ancient computers and monitors. There was, perhaps, a departmental admin somewhere beyond the initial Computer Graveyard, but Scully couldn't see her (or him). Lucy walked into the center of the room, sat on one of the grimy plastic chairs set around one of the small tables, and said, "Talk."

Scully remained standing while Mulder sat opposite Lucy at the table. "Why did you lie to us back at your house?"

She shrugged, one-shouldered again. "I'm not interested in helping the minions of the police state." With that eternally hostile expression, Scully could certainly see the family resemblance between her and Jason.

Mulder let that pass. "Jason had some interesting things to say about you."

Lucy cocked an eyebrow at that. "Did he? I'm sure you know exactly how much faith to put in a fourteen-year-old boy's stories."

"He did make an interesting case about Senator W——, Representative B——, and former Governor L——," Mulder said.

"Sounds like a more interesting fantasy than he usually has," Lucy said. "They usually involve naked women."

"He says you took a notebook from him," Mulder said.

"I'm his older sister," Lucy said, a little disbelievingly. "I take a lot of things from him. Don't either of you have older sisters?"

Scully was fairly certain she didn't wince visibly, thinking about Melissa.

Mulder wasn't phased, of course. Scully wondered idly how much he'd picked on Samantha. "He said you took a notebook from him at Christmas. It had something that read like instructions in the front of the book?"

Lucy's expression settled back into hostility. "I don't remember. I was a little busy grieving for my grandmother."

"I'm sorry for your loss," Mulder said, with more social facility than Scully generally expected from him. "We're just doing routine followup on a report."

"It's routine to fly across the country to check up on a 14-year-old's stories?" Lucy said sarcastically. "The FBI has more money than I thought." Still, Scully noticed that Lucy had started to fidget a little.

"When it's about assassinations," Mulder said, "the FBI is willing to go a long way."

Lucy looked at him stonily after sweeping her gaze across the space between Scully and the door.

Mulder let the silence rest for a moment, then said, "Well, if you find that notebook, please give us a call. We'd be interested in closing this case." He handed her a business card, and Scully tensed. 

Lucy glanced down at the card, then looked back up at Mulder. "Am I free to go?"

"Sure," Mulder said, leaning back in his chair.

Lucy got up slowly, tucking the card in her jeans pocket, and with a firm grip on her backpack and an eye on Scully, she left the room.

 

Back in the car, Scully burst out, "After all the Scullen and Muldoon nonsense, you just handed her your card?"

"I couldn't sleep last night," he said, "so I doctored a couple to say, William Muldoon.' I worried a little about some other William Muldoon dying, but she needs to associate the face with the name, according to Jason."

"Of course, if she has that power Jason mentioned," Scully said, "then we're both dead."

"True," he said. "But maybe she's less willing to trade away half her life for it than a 14-year-old boy."

Scully looked at him. "You've already started profiling her."

Mulder shrugged. "It's not that hard. It's all pretty much right there."

"Jason was afraid of her killing him," Scully said. "Was it a good idea to mention him?"

"She hasn't killed him yet," Mulder said. "She'll try to kill us first, I think. Her grandmother's death is still fresh in her mind."

Scully sighed. "Mulder, do you think everyone has the potential to become a serial killer? I mean, I wouldn't have pegged a woman about to graduate from college in a notoriously hard major for women to be in as one. But apparently given a tool to do it remotely and undetectably, she jumped right on that horse." She cleared her throat. "Assuming, of course, that this is all true."

The car filled with the smell of apples again, and Scully found herself looking over her shoulder as a shiver ran down her spine.

 

**March 8, 7:40 pm, Berkeley, California**

_How did we get to this point?_ Scully thought as she edged down the alley, gun in hand, hoping to head off Lucy at the pass.

They'd gone back to stake out the house again, and Lucy had come back, stuck around for a while, and then left with a much more stuffed backpack than she'd had before. So they followed. She took a bus, and they followed. She got off the bus and started to walk, and they followed, Scully on foot, Mulder in the car.

They lost sight of Lucy for just a few moments, and suddenly, someone had lurched into the path of Mulder's car. Mulder managed to stop in time, but the car on the other side of the road hadn't. Scully almost ran out to help, but Mulder, as he got out of the car, waved her on. If Lucy was willing to kill passerby to distract them—could she do that? did she just stop and ask the man his name and wrote how he would die? did Scully even believe all this?—then she needed to be stopped.

Scully turned the corner and found herself facing a Greyhound bus station. She put the gun away and walked toward the station.

As she entered the station, Lucy crashed into her, apparently walking fast to get out of the station. They staggered together, Scully trying to hold onto Lucy by the sweatshirt and wrist as they swung around wildly. 

Lucy hissed in her ear, "You're not the only people after me."

Scully thought, _DAMN IT_ , with a terrible grinding drop in her stomach. Lucy said, "They got to the house the night before you did. That guy was one of them." Then she broke her grip and ran.

Scully did the only thing she could, which was run after her.

Heels versus sneakers don't fare well anywhere, though Scully could hold her own on most city sidewalks.

As the chase resumed, Scully thought, _No, run toward people, not lonely streets, you stupid kid! Why do they always run for lonely places?_

Almost as if Lucy was reading her mind, she turned back toward a busy street. Scully followed, only slowly losing ground. 

Unfortunately, the theatre crowd brought her to a halt. Scully wasn't the tallest of women, and neither was Lucy. The agent lost the student in the anonymous crowd.

Scully indulged in a few obscenities before calling Mulder on her cell phone.

"He's dead," Mulder said.

"I guessed," Scully said. "I lost her."

"I guessed," Mulder said. "Where are you? I'll come get you when the police are done taking my statement."

 

**March 8, 10:08 pm, Berkeley, California**

"So they're after her too," Mulder said gloomily back in Scully's hotel room. "You know this means that we'll only hear about her body turning up."

"That's unlike you, Mulder," Scully said, rearranging the cold washcloth on her forehead. "You're usually trying to get there ahead of them."

"I can't think of a way to find her," Mulder said. "If she can't get away from them in a city she knows—and we know she won't—then there's nothing really we can do to help her."

"Well, the fact that she could kill the one in the street means that she got his name somehow. Maybe she's done the trade Jason talked about, and will be able to keep doing that." Scully sat up straighter in her chair and took the washcloth off her eyes. The headache she'd gotten from all that running on an empty stomach was easing. Just at that moment, she felt something drop out of the pocket of her blazer. She slid her hand down to the chair cushion and her fingers closed on something of hard plastic and metal.

"What's this?" she said, pulling it up to examine.

"Hm?" Mulder said, looking over with vague interest.

"It looks like a key," Scully said, displaying it for him. "Like… a key for one of those airport lockers…"

They stared at each other for a long moment, then ran for the car.

 

She had to try every damn locker in the Greyhound station, but she finally found the one the key opened.

Inside was a slim notebook with DEATH NOTE written on the cardboard cover.

Scully grabbed it and slid it into her jacket, where she held it surreptitiously by gripping the lower hem and the book. Without looking around, she walked straight back out to where Mulder was double-parked.

"Get us out of here," she said.

"She dropped the key into your pocket when you grabbed her?" Mulder said, pulling into late evening traffic.

"I guess so," Scully said. The notebook felt so inconsequential.

"Haaaaaah," said a horrible voice from behind her.

Scully whirled around to confront a hideous, staring, grinning face in the back seat and inhaled sharply. "Mulder!"

"What?" He looked over his shoulder blankly, trying not to crash into the few cars on the street. "What is it?"

"Yes, you can see me now," the monster said in a tone of amusement. "He can't. He's not touching it."

"Mulder, get us back to the hotel parking garage," Scully said tightly, biting down on her terror.

"I'm trying," he said, returning his attention to the road.

Scully swallowed hard and said, "You're… Ryuk?"

"That's me," it said. "This is all turning out to be much more interesting than I expected."

Its grey, wide-eyed face—or maybe the whole head?—appeared to be stitched down to its shoulders. The eyes were round, yellow, and staring, and it had a Joker smile around a mouth full of shark teeth. There was no nose to speak of, and spiky grey hair protruded from head and shoulders. The eyes glowed red in the dim light.

"What _are_ you?" Scully said.

"A Death Agent," it said. "I conduct the dead to the afterworld. Your little friend there knows that, though."

"Right," said Scully.

"Scully?" Mulder said in a concerned voice. Probably he was just used to being the one talking to shadows, she thought bitterly.

"Now _you_ have my Death Note," Ryuk said. "I'll be very interested to see what you do with it, FBI Agent Dana Katherine Scully."

The car went over a bump and down into a parking garage. Scully really didn't want the extra light to see Ryuk by. "Will Mul—" she hesitated over the second syllable, but it had just used her full name "—der be able to see you if he touches the notebook too?"

"Yes," the Death Agent rasped with apparent glee.

Mulder parked the car. Scully glanced around. "This isn't the hotel…?" she said.

"They'd be watching our hotel," Mulder said.

"Right," Scully said, and slid the notebook out of her jacket. 

Mulder reached over and touched the cover, then looked deliberately at the back seat. Scully was meanly gratified by his indrawn breath.

"You should see what she's written in there," Ryuk said.

Scully opened the notebook. There were, in fact, instructions written in a very awkward hand all down the inside cover. She looked at the first page. In messy handwriting, she saw David Stipes will kill himself written above a half dozen other names.

She glanced up and met Mulder's gaze, then turned the page. 

There was a page torn out here, a torn tail still protruding from the binding. On the next page, though, were several names she recognized, including the child molester who'd had a heart attack, the Senator, the Representative, and the former Governor. Those three had their improbable means of death written out carefully in block printing.

"Looks like she was thinking ahead," Mulder said, pointing down the page.

The rest of the page was filled with names, some that Scully recognized, others that she didn't, and they all had their deaths spelled out in the same precise printing. Some were… very creative. She turned the page. Another page filled with them. And another. And another.

"Busy girl," Mulder said.

"Woman," Scully corrected absently, distracted by the magnitude of murder she held in her hands.

On the sixth page, Scully found:  
LUCILLE MARIE NIGHTINGALE WILL DIE PEACEFULLY IN HER SLEEP OF A PAINLESS HEART ATTACK AT AGE 82, HAVING ELUDED ALL PURSUIT AND LIVED A LONG, ADVENTUROUS, AND PROSPEROUS LIFE OF HELPING OTHERS IN ATONEMENT FOR HER CRIMES.

"Wow," Mulder said.

"Will that work?" Scully said, glancing at the stiff-faced creature.

"I could just kill her, actually," Ryuk said. "I get her in the end. That's part of the deal when anyone uses the book. But I'm interested in what she'll do, so I'll probably follow her for a while."

"Why are you still interested?" Mulder said.

"Because she still has a piece of the Death Note," Ryuk said. "Just like her brother. So sneaky. I like that. Too bad the brother lost his piece."

Scully turned the page and found signs of several pages being torn out. "I see," she said, running her finger along the ragged edges.

"So, Agent Scully," Ryuk said, "how are _you_ going to use the Death Note?"

 

**March 14, 11:37 pm, Chicago, Illinois**

"You're very disappointing, Dana Scully," Ryuk said sulkily.

Scully was ready to do just about anything to get this _thing_ to stop following her. Waiting in a very dimly-lit bar in Chicago seemed like a small price to pay, if the Lone Gunmens' information was right.

Even Mulder didn't like to look at the Death Agent. It was a lurching, ungainly shape, skinny with too-long arms and a weirdly inhuman build. The thing really _bothered_ Scully to look at, because she kept unconsciously trying to figure out what its skeleton looked like, if it even _had_ one. She had no idea why it bothered Mulder. Maybe it looked like an alien gone wrong?

A short, round man with a goatee, glasses, and curly hair approached the table and sat down in the chair occupied by Ryuk. After a second's hesitation, he got up and shifted to the next chair over, scowling at the chair he'd just vacated. Ryuk laughed.

"I'm Arthur Nielsen," he said to them, and produced a Secret Service ID for them. Scully and Mulder each showed him their FBI IDs.

"You take care of things like this?" Scully said. "So that no one will use them?"

"Yes, that's the function of Warehouse 13," Nielsen said. "Containing dangerous artifacts. I understand from our mutual friends, Agent Mulder," he said with a nod to Mulder, "that this is a very dangerous item."

"Yes," Scully said. She pushed the slim little briefcase across the table to him.

"SO boring," Ryuk said, munching on an apple, and fading from her vision.

Nielsen produced a bag that he slid over the briefcase and then sealed shut by some means Scully couldn't see. "Don't worry, Agent Scully," he said. "I promise that this will be safely contained."

"Thank you," Scully said with a sgh of relief. "I'm very grateful to you."

"Can you give me any specifics?" Nielsen asked. 

"It has instructions written in the front cover," Mulder said.

"The gist is," said Scully, noticing Nielsen's glance at the sealed bag, "that the owner can kill people by writing their name in the book."

Nielsen nodded. "Ah, a Death Note. Yes, we have one in inventory."

"You _have_ one already?" Mulder said.

"Yes. It appeared, as far as we can tell, a little after World War 2," Nielsen said. "From Japan, since most of the early entries were written in Japanese. We think a US soldier or sailor got hold of it somehow and brought it back with him. It caused a bit of trouble."

_To say the least_ , thought Scully, and wondered who'd died then.

"There's a boy in Maryland who tore a page out of the book," Mulder said, "Though we hear he lost it. Here's his name and address, just in case." Mulder handed a piece of paper to Nielsen, who nodded.

"We'll take care of that," he promised.

"The last woman who had it also has several pages," Scully said, "but I don't think you'll find her."

"Oh?" Nielsen said.

"It's all in the book," Mulder said.

"Right," Nielsen said. "All right, well, I'd best be on my way."

"There's a monster… a Death Agent," Scully added hastily, "who follows that around. If you touch the notebook, you'll be able to see him. And he'll… _talk_ to you. All the time."

"We'll be careful," Nielsen assured her, standing up. "Thank you, Agents." And he strode away quickly. Scully's sharp eyes noticed another man slipping out after him, but Nielsen seemed to know he was there, so she didn't fret.

"Well, that's over," Mulder said, drinking down his beer at last. "I guess you got your answer, Scully."

"My answer?" Scully said. She'd been wondering what kind of organization this Warehouse 13 had to be, and how many "artifacts" they housed.

"To whether everyone has it in them to become a serial killer," Mulder said. "I could have told you that you didn't, though you wouldn't have believed me."

"Of course I would have, Mulder," she said, standing up.

"You never believe me, Scully," he said, joining her.

As they walked out, Scully said, "But in this case, Mulder, I want to believe."


End file.
